Google Colab vs Jina AI

Hosted Jupyter notebooks with free access to GPUs and TPUs. In the free version, notebooks run for at most 12 hours, depending on availability and usage, and idle runtimes time out. GPU access is heavily restricted, GPU and TPU types vary over time, and usage limits fluctuate. Colab Pro, Pro+ and Pay As You Go offer more compute, based on a balance of compute units.The page we cite for Google Colab states in words that it is free, which confirms the price — the limits stated here come from our own record rather than from that page.

• On a free runtime with no compute-unit balance, Google may terminate without warning sessions that use SSH shells, remote desktops, a web UI instead of the notebook, chess training or distributed computing workers. SSH shells, remote desktops and working in a web UI instead of the notebook are allowed on a paid plan while the compute-unit balance is positive. (From research.google.com/colaboratory/faq.html, read 2026-10-08.)
• A paid Google AI plan adds a monthly allotment of Colab compute units and stronger GPUs and TPUs to the same account. Storage-only Google One plans and free trials do not. (From research.google.com/colaboratory/faq.html, read 2026-10-08.)
• Google AI Plus adds 50 Colab compute units a month, but not during a free trial of the plan. (From support.google.com/googleone/answer/16882689, read 2026-10-16.)
• Google AI Pro adds 200 Colab compute units a month, but not during a free trial of the plan. (From support.google.com/googleone/answer/14534406, read 2026-10-16.)
• Google AI Ultra adds 1,000 or 2,000 Colab compute units a month, depending on the plan, with longer background execution and premium GPU access, but not during a free trial of the plan. (From support.google.com/googleone/answer/16286513, read 2026-10-16.)
• Colab Pro for Education, a free year of Colab Pro for students and faculty at US universities, is closed to new signups. (From research.google.com/colaboratory/faq.html, read 2026-10-16.)
• A running notebook can be terminated if compute units run out. The account then uses the free tier's rules until more units are added. (From research.google.com/colaboratory/faq.html, read 2026-10-10.)
• Colab bans file hosting, media serving and other web services not related to interactive compute on every managed runtime, free or paid. (From research.google.com/colaboratory/faq.html, read 2026-10-10.)
• Google publishes no RAM figure for Colab. The free version gets VMs with a standard system memory profile. Paid plans can get a high memory system profile, subject to availability and the compute unit balance. (From research.google.com/colaboratory/faq.html, read 2026-10-23.)
• On Colab Pro+ with a positive compute unit balance, a running notebook keeps executing after the browser closes, for up to 24 hours. Idle VMs are still deleted. Colab Pro gets extended execution times based on availability. Without a paid subscription, execution stops when you stop interacting. (From colab.research.google.com/signup, read 2026-10-23.)
• Google Colab offers Pay As You Go at $9.99 for 100 Compute Units or $49.99 for 500 Compute Units, with no subscription. Colab Pro is $9.99 per month for 100 compute units. Colab Pro+ is $49.99 per month for 600 compute units. Compute units are not refundable, not transferable, and expire after 90 days. These are US prices. (From colab.research.google.com/signup, read 2026-11-09.)

Search, Reader, embeddings and reranker APIs. Each new API key comes with 10M free tokens, shared across these APIs; no page says they renew. Jina's FAQ states for the hosted API: "No separate license needed. Commercial use is covered by the service terms: sign up and pay through this site or the cloud marketplace." CC BY-NC 4.0 covers self-hosting the model weights. The exception is jina-embeddings-v4, which is non-commercial only even through the API. Search (s.jina.ai) needs a key and costs at least 10,000 tokens a request, so the free tokens cover at most 1,000 searches. Search allows 100 requests a minute with a free key and the same with a paid key; only a premium key raises it, to 1,000. Reader (r.jina.ai), which converts a URL to LLM-friendly text, allows 500 requests a minute with a free or paid key, 5,000 with a premium key, and 20 without a key. Reader without a key is free and uses no tokens, so it keeps working after a key's free tokens run out. Paid tokens are prepaid: 1 billion for $50 ($0.05 per million), or 11 billion for $500 with a premium key. Jina AI has been part of Elastic since October 2025.The page we cite for Jina AI states in words that it is free, which confirms the price — the limits stated here come from our own record rather than from that page.

• Jina's terms say it does not use customer inputs to train models, but may use aggregated, anonymized operational metadata to improve services. (From jina.ai/legal, read 2026-10-16.)